A beginner's guide to Forkluck

This is the short version of how Forkluck fits together. Twenty minutes with a real ingredient list and one real recipe, and the rest will make sense on its own.

Where things live

The sidebar is the whole app. Analytics is the dashboard. Products is what you sell, Recipes is how you make it, Ingredients is what you buy. Menus groups products for a service or a day. Inventory is under construction. Invoices holds what your suppliers billed you, and Labor holds hours and wages. Below those, Integrations covers Sales (Square, Shopify) and Suppliers, and Settings covers currency, keys and the rest.

Start with ingredients

An ingredient in Forkluck is priced the way you buy it: a pack size and a pack price. A 25 kg sack at $18.40 becomes a unit price, and every future price you record is kept, so you can see what flour did over a year instead of only what it costs today. Aliases let one ingredient answer to the names your suppliers use for it.

You can type them in, import a purchase report (duplicates are caught, so re-importing an overlapping file is safe), or let Claude read a supplier invoice, receipt or credit memo straight from a PDF and turn it into priced lines you approve. That last one runs on your own Anthropic API key, which you add in Settings.

Write a recipe

Paste the recipe the way you would write it on paper. Lines like 620 g Flour or 8 ea Eggs are read into a quantity, a unit and an ingredient. A line can point at another recipe, so a levain or a pastry cream costs itself once and gets used everywhere. Add steps and a yield.

The cost tab then shows batch cost, portion cost, food cost percentage and a suggested price. Bread and cake recipes also get a formulation panel: baker's percentages against flour weight, hydration with the 65 to 85% bread benchmark alongside it, and salt at 1.5 to 2.5%. Every recipe carries a nutrition label with allergens, US majors and the EU list, written as "Contains" and "May contain".

Connect your sales

Square or Shopify. Your catalog comes across and you map each product to the recipe that makes it. After that, sales flow in on their own. Refunds arrive as negative quantities rather than being averaged away, modifiers add consumption without inventing revenue, and a bundle is split back across the products inside it by their relative value.

Add labor

Import a timesheet CSV, set each employee's rate, then set two numbers: the weekly overtime threshold and the payroll burden percentage on top of wages. Unpaid breaks are deducted. Labor then sits next to food in prime cost.

Read the dashboard

Net sales, prime cost, invoice spend, labor, average food cost and top products. Biggest price moves are compared against a period you pick, the prior week or the same week 52 weeks ago among others. For a saved menu, the forecast builds each product's baseline from the four prior matching weekdays, so a Saturday is only ever compared to Saturdays.

Where to start

Ingredients first, because everything else prices off them. Then one recipe, ideally one you already think you know the cost of. Then a menu. That is enough to see whether the numbers agree with your gut.